The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS), developed and implemented by the U.S. Department of Defense, uses position and time information broadcast from a constellation of up to 24 satellites, moving in non-geosynchronous orbits, to allow determination of the present time and observer location and velocity adjacent to the Earth's surface.
Several workers have proposed approaches for reducing or removing multipath signal errors. Lakatos, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,537,008, distinguishes between a direct or "specular" path from transmitter to receiver and one or more "echo" paths that provide multipath signals for that transmission. A modulated pilot signal is transmitted together with a message signal, and arrival of the known modulated signal is continuously monitored at the receiver. The modulated signal is of finite length and acts as a timing signal to open and close a gate at the receiver. The contemporaneously transmitted direct signal is admitted through the gate, but later arriving echo signals are not admitted. This system uses two parallel signal processing paths at the receiver, one path containing a phase locked loop for recognition of the modulated signal. If an echo signal arrives before the receiver gate closes, a portion of the echo signal will also be admitted and treated as part of the direct message signal.
Decomposition of the arriving signal into selected contiguous but nonoverlapping frequency intervals to reduce multipath signal error is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,542,954, issued to Flanagan. The transmitted direct signal and any echo signals are received and normalized at a plurality of spaced apart transducers, at each of which this frequency decomposition occurs. Among the transducers, the maximum signal in each frequency interval is chosen, and a composite direct signal at the intended receiver is constructed from this maximum signal set.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,566,035, issued to Noll et al, discloses use of the "complex cepstrum" (Fourier transform of the logarithm of the power spectrum plus phase angle) of short time interval, partly overlapping segments of a transmitted signal to determine periodicity or aperiodicity of a received signal. Flanagan discloses application of the cepstrum function to multipath signal suppression, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,662,108. The complex cepstrum of a received composite signal is formed, and the inverse Fourier transform of the real part of the cepstrum is computed. This inverse transform signal is clipped about a selected center to remove some distortion components, and the remaining "mountain top" signal has a sequence of maxima at time values corresponding to arrival of the desired signal and undesired multipath replicas at the receiver.
Menard discloses a multipath time delay and correlation bandwidth analyzer system in U.S. Pat. No. 3,596,182. A correlation function is formed between a signal received at the receiver and a selected reference signal generated at the receiver. If the received signal contains strong multipath contributions, displaced in time from each other, the correlation function will contain two or more correlation pulses or maxima, also displaced in time. The reference signal can be a time delayed replica of the received signal.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,605,018, issued to Coviello, discloses a nonlinear signal processing system useful for suppressing strong multipath signals in a quaternary phase, spread spectrum communications system. A received composite signal, containing the desired signal and a superimposed strong multipath signal, is passed through a circuit containing a signal envelope detector and a signal averager, arranged in parallel. The envelope detector and signal averager output signals are applied to two terminals of a differential amplifier. The diff amp output signal is an estimate of the desired signal.
A system for quantitatively measuring multipath signal distortion is disclosed by Close in U.S. Pat. No. 3,869,673. A local oscillator, mixer and amplitude limiter are applied to a received signal to provide a first signal representing frequency variation and a second signal representing amplitude variation of the received signal. A correlation signal formed from the product of these first and second signals is a quantitative measure of multipath distortion present in the received signal.
Costas discloses apparatus for minimization of distortion in signals containing multipath signals and Doppler shift effects in U.S. Pat. No. 4,349,915. Signal arrival delay, such as produced by multipath signals, is determined by examining a selected frequency contribution of spaced apart pulses that arrive at the receiver.
Gutleber, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,457,007, discloses a multipath signal interference reduction system in which a plurality of replicas of the received signal, with different time delays, amplitudes and signal widths, are sequentially subtracted from the arriving composite signal (desired signal plus multipath signals) to produce a new composite signal with markedly reduced multipath signal contribution.
An adaptive multipath distortion equalizer, disclosed by Nossen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,669,091, uses simulation of the multipath distortion, based upon the composite signals received. After this multipath distortion signal is estimated, this distortion signal is subtracted from the composite signal received to produce an estimate of the desired signal. This approach uses time delay lines, amplitude scale factors and phase adjustments to obtain the estimated multipath distortion signal.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,762,638, Taguchi et al disclose a multipath signal canceller that uses an envelope detector to determine the shape of a received composite pulse. This shape is compared with the shape of an undistorted pulse (earliest arriving pulse) stored in the receiver. The difference between these two shapes is used to construct a distortion-cancelling signal for signals that subsequently arrive at the receiver.
A method for multipath signal suppression in television receivers, disclosed by David Koo in U.S. Pat. No. 5,111,298, uses transmission of a test signal that is sampled and transformed to the frequency domain. Portions of the frequency spectrum are redistributed to other frequency ranges where the spectrum amplitude is nearly zero, and the redistributed spectrum is transformed back to the time domain to produce a processed signal where echo signal contributions are suppressed.
Koo discloses another method for echo signal cancellation in television receivers in U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,211, again working with the frequency domain transform of a received test signal.
These approaches often require extensive post-processing and use mathematically complex manipulations that are not consistent with the requirements for real time processing of signals received at high data rates. Further, these approaches do not allow separate compensation for atmospheric time delay of signal propagation.
What is needed is a method for reducing or eliminating the error contributions from multipath signals and from receiver noise by parallel, real time processing of signals derived from the GPS (or, more generally, SATPS) signals received from the SATPS satellites. Preferably, the system should allow for separate compensation of ionospheric time delay of signal propagation so that certain time constants associated with statistical processing of the SATPS signals may be as large as desired.